Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life...

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I had a startlingly scary realisation the other day. April. Where did that come from? The first three months of 2010 have flown by and I really haven't got very far with my resolutions. Not a surprise I guess. One of my resolutions was to read two new books a month and I am very disappointed with myself for not having made more of an effort with this.

I love books, I could spend hours in a bookshop. I love reading, I really do, I get very passionate about what I am reading it's just it seems to take me a great deal of effort for me to pick up a book and start reading. I find that it takes at least three chapters before I get comfortable with a book so I always find starting them the hardest bit. I find it hard to switch off every thing else to just concentrate on a book but my reading pile is getting so big I need to stop myself getting so distracted.

It's crazy, because once I get into a good book it completely consumes me. Every spare minute is devoted to devouring each page and I'll wax lyrical about it for ages afterwards, even reading parts of it to Mr M at times. I want my children to grow up loving reading as much as me so I need to give myself more of a chance. Books are very important in our house, I get so excited by new arrivals and my weakness is cookery books, of which I have at least 200. My children's rooms are full of books and bedtime stories are an integral part of the day that cannot be missed - I don't even remove them as a punishment.

So what's on my list? I'm currently favouring non-fiction as you will see. Books that I am currently stacking up are as follows;

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters
Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of a Great English Dynasty
The Holocaust
The Last Curtsey
Her Fearful Symmetry
Feels Like Maybe
Rainy Days and Tuesdays
Jumping in Puddles
Children of England: The Heirs of King Henry VIII 1547-1558
America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
On Chesil Beach
The Mill on the Floss (Wordsworth Classics)
Love in the Present Tense
The Photograph
Jane Eyre (Wordsworth Classics)
Since I Don't Have You
Bad Science
For One More Day
Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson
The Making of Modern Britain
Wolf Hall
Birdsong
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital

I know, I know, it's a massive list which might take me until 2012 to finish, and yet I keep adding to it all the time.

This week I have started reading The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War, a book about the first two years after WWI. For some reason books based on Social History tend to be what grab me the most.

Please do comment if you have read any of the above. I'd love to hear your thoughts - good and bad - about the books that lie ahead of me! And if you think there is a book I would enjoy, do let me know.

love & kisses
Mrs M x